Made in China Chapter 7

I was captured by the Turks and served a few months in a fairly decent prison camp toward the end of the war. Everyone knew the war was ending but being held captive we didn’t say anything for fear our captors would go ahead and kill us out of anger because it was evident they were losing. To the contrary, they were quite gracious and near the end we were receiving even better rations including goat milk from a herd of goats that foraged about the camp, often in the courtyard our cells surrounded in plain view. The Turks were unlike anything we had heard them to be. At home, everyone said they were a bloodthirsty people with no moral character or worth. I always thought that was pretty funny because there wasn’t much moral character coming from the people who claimed they had no moral character and such an argument is flawed on the basis of relativity. We each had our own cell and were not allowed to converse but some of us tried to communicate by tapping on the walls to each other. Tit, tit, tit, tat, tit. Tit, tit, tit, tat, tit. There were enough tits and tats to drive a man insane. We could yell to the next cell but they had signs posted everywhere that said “No Talking!” so no one risked his neck by going against it. We had no reason to be afraid, they hadn’t publically executed or even whipped anyone but, after all, we were eating each other and no one seemed too eager to be tomorrow’s meat loaf.

To pass time, some prisoners scraped the walls with rocks, drawing naked women on the concrete. Beauty is relative. I didn’t draw a naked woman because crude pornographic images don’t really do anything for me even though I am a fairly decent artist and could have drawn a real boner banger. Instead, I drew a pretty portrait of Zula Zane, chest up. I didn’t know if I would survive the war or what would become of the prison camp afterwards but I prided my cell in being worth preservation, thinking that someday maybe it would be a museum and people would pay the fare and come strolling through, stopping to look at Zula’s beautiful face I colored with different rocks. I always had such grandiose thoughts of myself since I was young. Maybe my cell would be as I left it, my toothbrush in the tin pork-and-beans can, my books in the wooden milk crate, my bed pulled tight and my pillow with the subtle indention of my head, the laundry sack cinched shut with a small length of rope, full of famous straw. My candle would still be on a shelf by my bed, frozen wax dripping from it halfway down the side, along with my wire-framed reading glasses with the ear pieces chewed and crossed. As a kid I was a graffitist doing my part to make the abysmal world more of an esthetic place to live. I drew mostly animals then, animals that I remembered seeing when I was young that were seldom seen or that were altogether extinct.

I got to see other cells and a horde of naked abstract women because I was a trusty and helped deliver meals and books on a little squeaky metal pushcart that I imagined once to be used in surgery for holding scalpels and needles instead of Nabokov and Joyce, cigarettes and strands of human jerky. Our captors let us read books to pass time, and they offered us pretty good books, at that. They were classics mostly, being that there weren’t many books being published anymore. They even had a fair share of American books. The whore of the collection was Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain which I liked but didn’t enjoy as much as I had been told that I should. Still, I wanted to be Mark Twain.

The women on the walls were terribly crude and disproportionate and rather than looking like something ripe and fuckable, they looked like piles of rotten fruit, with bananas for arms, carrots for noses, pumpkin posteriors and on top watermelons with faces pecked by the beak of an abstractionist vulture. Hardly was there the presence of a neck and when there was they were entirely too long and thin. I tried not to look at the women but they were hard to miss and when I came by they were so happy to see another American they would introduce them as though they were live and in the flesh, which usually went like so: “Sgt. Bowie, this is Angela.”

“Angela, how do you do? Pleasure to meet you.”

“She says, ‘fine, thanks.’ Whad’ya bring me?”

It was hard to imagine how they saw beautiful women in what they had drawn but as my father said, art and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I was a trusty because the Turks liked my positive attitude and because I had read most of the books in the collection so I could recommend good ones to the prisoners according to what I thought they might like. Usually, though, I disregarded what they might like and suggested instead what they should like. My main suggestions were To Kill a Mockingbird, Shoeless Joe and Farewell to Arms. However, I unfortunately and regretfully suggested the last to a most unfortunate soldier who had been run over by a tank and lost both arms. I don’t think he heard my suggestion when I said it and when he finally came to, he grunted a very morose question, “How da fuck ya spect me to turn da pages, Captain Asshole?” I stared at him for a minute thinking it over, and coming to no conclusion I pushed the squeaky cart on to the next guy. I hadn’t time for him. The Turks liked me because I didn’t groan about being in prison and I didn’t groan about the meals. What is the point? Would it get me anywhere if I did? Certainly not. Simple logic.

One of the popular tappings between American POWs was the motto of the U.S. Army, “Freedom isn’t free.” It was meant to inspire the troops and the citizenry and people have been saying it since we began responding to terrorists attacks very incompetently at the turn of the millennium. It was a pretty popular line but it was old hat to me. I had enough of that patriotic bullshit to last me a lifetime. I knew that we were here to pay a debt to China with our blood yet it was being dressed up at home like a Thanksgiving turkey that the brave American troops are freeing the world from the evil grasp of the Wild Turks reminiscent of WWII and Hitler. I didn’t do any of the tapping because there was no one I really wanted to talk to even if it worked. I take that back, one night I asked the guy next to me if he had any salt for dinner. He said no. Life wasn’t nearly as bad on us as it had been on POWs in wars past. The Turks were alright. At least, as most of us thought, we weren’t being killed. In fact, had I known that prison life was going to be this agreeable I would have given myself up years ago.

Our cells wrapped around the large courtyard where those goats roamed but unfortunately for us the front was open to the elements. I was in a bottom-level cell so water from the heavy rains that were prevalent this time of year often flooded in through the bars. But we had plenty of straw and more than enough warm wool blankets. The only bad part was the rats that seemed to come with the rain as though they floated in on the tides. But the Turks were prepared for the rats and provided us each with a cat with the agreement that we would not eat or rape it. Such agreements needed to be made and no man was accused of either crime, but there were a lot of strange noises in those lonely nights of some unlucky cats getting it. My cat’s name was Alexia. She was a ginger colored beauty with deep violet-colored eyes. Many nights I lied in bed staring up at the portrait of Zula Zane listening to Alexia hunt rats skillfully. The few that she got a hold of she tore to pieces with little pity. All that was ever left for me the next morning was the same curious assortment of smeared blood, a tail and a disassembled skeleton which lay on the stone floor like a child’s model airplane fresh from the box. The pussies, as they were delicately and duplicitously referred, were effective as the rats only plagued us for a very short period…until they came. Some men considered themselves lucky to have a cat that preferred not to eat all of the rats, leaving them some pickings. Some men fed their cats their meals and ate the rats considering it far less perverse, but there would be something eerie to me about a cat that had developed a taste for human meat staring at me as I tried to sleep.

Work details varied. Most of the men were allowed to participate in some sort of work. The majority of those were given pick-axes and shovels and after being fastened securely on a long length of chain were sent a half-mile up a gravel road to gather sand from a nearby quarry which we used for keeping our cells dry and for our cats’ litter-boxes—litter-boxes that were formerly humdrum shoe boxes before we each were each given a fine assortment of crafts to decorate them fancifully. Words will fail to describe the intricacy and cuteness of my dear Alexia’s throne of a litter-box so I will leave its description as described and woefully inadequate.

The cells on the bottom level were formerly horse stalls and you could both see and smell the nostalgia. The doors were half wood and the bars were put in the open space from chest-level to the top of the frame, sturdy but not impossible to break if you wanted. No one wanted. Escaping meant certain death. The cells smelled permanently stained of horse manure and there were hooks on the wall where brushes and tools once hung for the care of horses. We used the hooks to dry our laundry. The horses who once lived here were all dead according to one of the Turk guards named Ramus, a cheery older fellow who always wore the same tattered olive drab overcoat and blue stocking cap, who I am proud to say was a dear friend. Ramus said with no pride that he in fact had eaten the very horse that inhabited my cell, whose name was Jesus the Christ because of the crucifix-shaped marking on his forehead. Ramus added mournfully that he was very fond of that horse but he was very hungry and it couldn’t be helped. Lucky for me I was a prisoner when it was relatively warm and food was plentiful. Nearly every night the guards, including Ramus, would light a large bonfire in the courtyard and the Turkish soldiers would gather around and drink from ceramic wine jugs and watch a pretty young woman dance. She always wore either red or yellow pants, a pink or blue top and a veil of any color, but her midriff was always bare like a belly dancer. She looked like a straight-from-the-bottle Arabic genie and she would never unveil her face or take anything off but she danced in such a way that she needn’t remove anything to excite the libido.

I knew what my fellow prisoners must have been thinking. She wouldn’t have lasted a day dancing like that back home in Detroit, or Boston, or in some smoke-filled strip club in Lubbock. But our eyes were all glued to her every move. Alexia seemed interested too and I held her and petted her while the young woman performed. Music came from the soldiers, a harpsichord, bells, makeshift drums, a tambourine or two, and a sitar playing as they danced crazily around her. The stage was directly in front of the bonfire and her beautiful skin glistened with sweat, especially beautiful when there was a full moon. A chaplain of ours who was in a lower level cell said it was hedonistic Satanism but it didn’t stop him from watching. No one liked him anyway so no one cared what he had to say. The woman swirled and jumped beautifully and other than my Zula Zane, she may have been the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Some of the prisoners complained about her when she wasn’t dancing, when I would deliver meals or books and they tried to have conversations to keep their sanity. Jana was her name. “It is psychological warfare, against the Geneva convention!” one such complainer cried.

“Well, you don’t have to watch her.” I said. No reply. Alexia and I watched Jana dance and when she was through, I whistled and applauded as zealously as the Turkish soldiers, grateful for something beautiful, having lived buried in the hairy armpit of depravity in such a long and dreadful, ugly war. It baffled me how Jana could be alive in such an inhospitable world. Since the death of most of the world’s women, and the advent of buying China girls from a catalog, each living woman was valued monetarily and men liked to guess the worth of a woman which was entirely based upon esthetics and age. Prices and the value of currency had dropped substantially but Jana was a million dollar commodity. Ramus told me that she was Alexi Olavstrauss’ seventeen year-old daughter and the entirely decent but seductive dance she did was her way of thanking the troops for their service to her father and to their country. Ramus said that she not only dances in the prison camps but also near the front lines. “Onu görünce km çalıştırmak için topal erkek ve korkak erkek Aslanlar savaşmak için ilham!” he said. But realizing he said it in Turkish he quickly and apologetically translated for me reverently in English. “The zight of her inspire lame men run vor miles and coward men vight lions!”

Indeed, Ramus was right. “But why do they let us watch her? They could easily put curtains up on our cells or have her dance somewhere else.”

“In Umerikin don’t dey zay never luke gift horse in zee mout?”

“Yes, they do.”

“Oh! I zwear I hear horses in my sleep sint I ate Jesus zee Christ! Anznow I zay tings about zee horse! Oh, hell!” Ramus rubbed his stubbly fat chin for a moment regaining his composure. “His Excellency, Alexi Olavstrauss, lets you watch to reward you vor laying down arms.” He slapped himself on the head resentfully and said softly to me, “Oh, boy! No pune intended vor dat fellow wizout zee arms.”